To see and be seen : cinematic constructions of gender and spectatorship in contemporary screen-based art

To See and Be Seen: Cinematic Constructions of Gender and Spectatorship in Contemporary Screen-Based Art addresses how gendered representation can be structured within visual art practice through a series of creative moving-image works. Using the aesthetic language of French New Wave cinema as its primary point of departure, this research project investigates how gendered representations are constructed by cinematic language. In doing this, it proposes latent possibilities present within the dominant gaze created by patriarchal relations of power. This project, in a series of creative works, demonstrates how the 'masculine' authorial gaze is learnt culturally, and by examining the gendered syntax of film, reveals how this can be recontextualised by the female artist.

Can objects perform?: agency and thingliness in contemporary sculpture and installation

In his 1967 essay, “Art and Objecthood”, Michael Fried bemoaned the theatricality of minimalist sculpture, which replaced the presentness of compositional sculpture with the staging of an experience for the viewer as performer. His argument has since been inverted by artists and art writers invested in the idea of sculptures as props forming part of an artistic experience economy. This discourse has accompanied the rise of relational aesthetics as a dominant paradigm for contemporary art. More recently, however, there has been a turn away from relationality to ‘object-oriented’ art, where objects are seen to stage their own theatrical experiences, performing themselves without requiring the activation of a viewer’s body. We trace parallels between the philosophy of Bruno Latour and the “Speculative Materialism” group and this emerging trend in sculpture. In ascribing agency to objects, Latour proposes a radical shift from philosophy’s traditional investigation of the relationship between the mind and the world. Drawn to the idea that matter can be creative, artists have embraced his thinking. However, we argue that this has lead to a generalized, universalizing humanism that disables political action. Moreover, it undermines the potential for anti-humanist critique latent in object-oriented philosophy.

Contemporary Australia : women, Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane 21 April–22 July 2012

'Contemporary Australia: Women' is the second in a series of triennial exhibitions at the Gallery of Modern Art in Queensland, providing a survey of contemporary art practices across the country. This exhibition's focus on women artists comes in the wake of a number of high profile international exhibitions looking at women artists in both contemporary and historical contexts. This review situates the exhibition within this field and considers its significance.

On APT 6 : Rohan Wealleans performing identity at the disjuncture between customary and contemporary culture

A review of the 6th APT focusing on the work and performance of Rohan Wealleans

Processes of transformation : art into pop and back again

This research project was a case study for managing and innovating an interdisciplinary practice: specifically across music, performance and contemporary art. Key works included painting/sound/video installation, experimental performance, electronic pop music, music video and electronic pop music performance. An idiosyncratic and transformative use of colour emerged as an underlying theme and strategy for cohesion. The project offers strategies for the challenges of interdisciplinary practice specifically addressing the limitations related to institutionalised value systems, aesthetic traditions and disciplinary languages.

The digital-bricoleur: Contemporary screen-based visual art practices

This paper describes a practice-led methodology that combines contemporary art theory and processes, as well as concepts of fan studies to construct a space for the critical and creative exploration of screen culture. The research promotes new possibilities for purposeful creative engagements with the screen, framed through the lens of what I term the digital-bricoleur. This performative, link-making approach documents the complicit tendencies that arise out of my affective relationship with screen culture, mapping out a cultural terrain in which I can creatively and critically ‘play’. The creative exploitation of this improvisational and aleatory activity then forms the creative research outputs. It appropriates and reconfigures content from screen culture, creating digital video installations aimed at engendering new experiences and critical interpretations of screen culture.

Visual Disobedience: The Geopolitics of Experimental Art in Central America, 1990-Present

This dissertation centers on the relationship between art and politics in postwar Central America as materialized in the specific issues of racial and gendered violence that derive from the region's geopolitical location and history. It argues that the decade of the 1990s marks a moment of change in the region's cultural infrastructure, both institutionally and conceptually, in which artists seek a new visual language of experimental art practices to articulate and conceptualize a critical understanding of place, experience and knowledge. It posits that visual and conceptual manifestations of violence in Central American performance, conceptual art and installation extend beyond a critique of the state, and beyond the scope of political parties in perpetuating violent circumstances in these countries. It argues that instead artists use experimental practices in art to locate manifestations of racial violence in an historical system of domination and as a legacy of colonialism still witnessed, lived, and learned by multiple subjectivities in the region. In this postwar period artists move beyond the cold-war rhetoric of the previous decades and instead root the current social and political injustices in what Aníbal Quijano calls the `coloniality of power.' Through an engagement of decolonial methodologies, this dissertation challenges the label "political art" in Central America and offers what I call "visual disobedience" as a response to the coloniality of seeing. I posit that visual colonization is yet another aspect of the coloniality of power and indispensable to projects of decolonization. It offers an analysis of various works to show how visual disobedience responds specifically to racial and gender violence and the equally violent colonization of visuality in Mesoamerica. Such geopolitical critiques through art unmask themes specific to life and identity in contemporary Central America, from indigenous genocide, femicide, transnational gangs, to mass imprisonments and a new wave of social cleansing. I propose that Central American artists--beyond an anti-colonial stance--are engaging in visual disobedience so as to construct decolonial epistemologies in art, through art, and as art as decolonial gestures for healing.

Le recyclage du déchet dans l'art du XXIe siècle : trois études de cas

Pour respecter les droits d'auteur, la version électronique de ce mémoire a été dépouillée de ses documents visuels et audio-visuels. La version intégrale du mémoire a été déposée au Service de la gestion des documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal.

On medium specificity and discipline crossovers in modern art : An interview with Jacques Ranciére on Medium-Specificity and Discipline Crossovers in Modern Art

Jacques Ranciere's work on aesthetics has received a great deal of attention recently. Given his work has enormous range – taking in art and literature, political theory, historiography, pedagogy and worker's history – Andrew McNamara and Toni Ross (UNSW) seek to explore his wider project in this interview, while showing how it leads to his alternative insights into aesthetics. Rancière sets aside the core suppositions linking the medium to aesthetic judgment, which has informed many definitions of modernism. Rancière is emphatic in freeing aesthetic judgment from issues of medium-specificity. He argues that the idea of autonomy associated with medium-specificity – or 'truth to the medium' – was 'a very late one' in modernism, and that post-medium trends were already evident in early modernism. While not stressing a simple continuity between early modernism and contemporary art, Ranciere nonetheless emphasizes the ethical and political ramifications of maintaining an a-disciplinary stance.

Stephen Russell : Super Vanitas

This article is an analysis and contextualisation of 'Super Vanitas' a video installation by Stephen Russell that was held at Boxcopy ARI, Brisbane. It discusses the significance of the painting 'Death of Marat' (J.L. David, 1793) to the work and describes the methodological processes that are revealed in the work.

Relics

Relics is a single-channel video derived from a 3D computer animation that combines a range of media including photography, drawing, painting, and pre-shot video. It is constructed around a series of pictorial stills which become interlinked by the more traditionally filmic processes of panning, zooming and crane shots. In keeping with these ideas, the work revolves around a series of static architectural forms within the strangely menacing enclosure of a geodesic dome. These clinical aspects of the work are complemented by a series of elements that evoke fluidity : fireworks, mirrored biomorphic forms and oscillating projections. The visual dimension of the work is complemented by a soundtrack of rainforest bird calls. Through its ambiguous combination of recorded and virtual imagery, Relics explores the indeterminate boundaries between real and virtual space. On the one hand, it represents actual events and spaces drawn from the artist studio and image archive; on the other it represents the highly idealised spaces of drawing and 3D animation. In this work the disembodied wandering virtual eye is met with an uncanny combination of scenes, where scale and the relationships between objects are disrupted and changed. Through this simultaneity between the real and the virtual, the work conveys a disembodied sense of space and time that carries a powerful sense of affect. Relics was among the first international examples of 3D animation technology in contemporary art. It was originally exhibited in the artist’s solo show, ‘Places That Don’t Exist’ (2007, George Petelin Gallery, Gold Coast) and went on to be included in the group shows ‘d/Art 07/Screen: The Post Cinema Experience’ (2007, Chauvel Cinema, Sydney) , ‘Experimenta Utopia Now: International Biennial of Media Art’ (2010, Arts Centre, Melbourne and national touring venues) and ‘Move on Asia’ (2009, Alternative space Loop, Seoul and Para-site Art Space, Hong Kong) and was broadcast on Souvenirs from Earth (Video Art Cable Channel, Germany and France). The work was analysed in catalogue texts for ‘Places That Don’t Exist’ (2007), ‘d/Art 07’ (2007) and ‘Experimenta Utopia Now’ (2010) and the’ Souvenirs from Earth’ website.

An interview with Jacques Rancière : on medium-specificity and discipline crossovers in modern art

Jacques Rancière's work on aesthetics has received a great deal of attention in recent years. Given his work has enormous range – covering art and literature, political theory, historiography, pedagogy and worker's history – Andrew McNamara and Toni Ross (UNSW) explore his wider critical ambitions in this interview, while showing how it leads to alternative insights into aesthetics. Rancière sets aside the core suppositions linking the medium to aesthetic judgment, which has informed many definitions of modernism. Rancière is emphatic in freeing aesthetic judgment from issues of medium-specificity. He argues that the idea of autonomy associated with medium-specificity – or 'truth to the medium' – was 'a very late one' in modernism, and that post-medium trends were already evident in early modernism. While not stressing a simple continuity between early modernism and contemporary art, Ranciere nonetheless emphasizes the on-going ethical and political ramifications of maintaining an a-disciplinary stance.

Supermassive

“Supermassive” is a synchronised four-channel video installation with sound. Each video channel shows a different camera view of an animated three-dimensional scene, which visually references galactic or astral imagery. This scene is comprised of forty-four separate clusters of slowly orbiting white text. Each cluster refers to a different topic that has been sourced online. The topics are diverse with recurring subjects relating to spirituality, science, popular culture, food and experiences of contemporary urban life. The slow movements of the text and camera views are reinforced through a rhythmic, contemplative soundtrack. As an immersive installation, “Supermassive” operates somewhere between a meditational mind map and a representation of a contemporary data stream. “Supermassive” contributes to studies in the field of contemporary art. It is particularly concerned with the ways that graphic representations of language can operate in the exploration of contemporary lived experiences, whether actual or virtual. Artists such as Ed Ruscha and Christopher Wool have long explored the emotive and psychological potentials of graphic text. Other artists such as Doug Aitken and Pipilotti Rist have engaged with the physical and spatial potentials of audio-visual installations to create emotive and symbolic experiences for their audiences. Using a practice-led research methodology, “Supermassive” extends these creative inquiries. By creating a reflective atmosphere in which divergent textual subjects are pictured together, the work explores not only how we navigate information, but also how such navigations inform understandings of our physical and psychological realities. “Supermassive” has been exhibited internationally at LA Louver Gallery, Venice, California in 2013 and nationally with GBK as part of Art Month Sydney, also in 2013. It has been critically reviewed in The Los Angeles Times.